Die Abenteuer des Huck Finn (2012)

The story generally follows Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but also departs from it considerably in places. After Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer find a treasure, Huck becomes wealthy and lives with the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who raises him strictly. Huck longs for his former carefree life. When he learns that his greedy and violent father has appeared in town to get his hands on Huck’s money, he sells his fortune to Judge Thatcher. Shortly afterward, his father captures him, but Huck manages to escape and comes across Jim, the Widow Douglas’s house slave. Jim has recently seen his wife and a little boy at a slave auction. He plans to travel to Ohio, where slavery has already been abolished, and earn enough money there to buy his family’s freedom. The relationship between Huck and Jim deepens into friendship, although Huck repeatedly finds himself at odds with his inherited beliefs—for instance, the idea that Black people cannot feel love. Huck himself also risks being hanged for helping a fugitive slave. They build a raft and travel down the Mississippi on it. Their destination is Cairo, where Jim plans to take a mail boat upriver to Ohio. Before long, three slave traders are after Jim, because the Widow Douglas wants him back and has offered a large reward. Huck’s father joins them and offers them a share of Huck’s treasure. In a succession of events and comic scenes, pursuers and pursued keep crossing paths. More than once, they escape thanks to one of Huck’s tricks. Just before Cairo, two actors and swindlers join them; for a long time, their intentions remain unclear. They suggest that Jim pretend to be tied up so they can get past the strict checks by the plantation slave overseers. Huck trusts them, but Jim does not, and this leads to several arguments between the two as well. Only in a saloon in Cairo does Huck overhear their true intentions: they plan to turn Jim in for a reward and leave Huck behind. But Huck is unable to free Jim in time. Only after considerable complications, during which Jim is shot, do they make it onto the mail boat at the last moment. A stranger tends to Jim’s gunshot wound aboard the boat. Contrary to Huck’s initial belief, the stranger is not a doctor but a writer of stories named Mark Twain, who asks them to recount their adventures. In an epilogue, Twain’s voice says that Jim arrived safely in Ohio, found work, and was able to buy his family’s freedom. Huck returns to St. Petersburg, where Tom Sawyer greets him enthusiastically.